Letitia James Scores Again, Nails Notorious MAGA Election Fraudsters

Far-right provocateur Jacob Wohl and lobbyist Jack Burkman have a history of promoting conspiracy theories, unsuccessfully trying to frame public figures for made-up sexual assaults, and saying fraudulent things. Now they have to pay more than $1 million for a robocall scheme meant to discourage Black voters during the 2020 election.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has reached a settlement with the pair, who were found to have violated the Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act by a New York federal judge in 2023. Wohl and Burkman have been ordered to pay “up to $1.25 million” in the deal.

“The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, and it belongs to everyone,” James said in a statement released on Tuesday. “We will not allow anyone to threaten that right. Wohl and Burkman orchestrated a depraved and disinformation-ridden campaign to intimidate Black voters in an attempt to sway the election in favor of their preferred candidate.”

The calls, directed at areas with predominantly Black populations, made wild claims during the summer of 2020 about how voting by mail was unsafe. The robocalls insisted that voting by mail would put people’s personal data at risk of being used by local law enforcement to track old warrants, used by credit card companies to collect debts, and even used to make a database for “mandatory vaccines.” The robocalls mentioned Burkman and Wohl by name, making it easy for authorities to connect the effort to the pair.

Tuesday’s settlement is not the only legal consequence the two face for their voter intimidation efforts, which also affected Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and several other states. In June 2023, the Federal Communications Commission fined Burkman and Wohl $5,134,500 for the scheme, the largest penalty ever at the time it was proposed under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. In Ohio, Burkman and Wohl were each sentenced to community service, $2,500 fines, and probation. In Michigan, the case is pending before the state Supreme Court.

If the pair fail to pay at least $105,000 of the fine to the New York attorney general’s office, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, and people harmed by the scheme by December 31, 2024, the fine’s amount will increase to $1.25 million.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is back to torching House Speaker Mike Johnson.

On Tuesday, the Georgia Republican attempted to threaten her colleague, circulating a vicious five-page memo calling for his removal from leadership while accusing the caucus of ignoring the wills of its constituents via the party’s alleged “complete and total surrender” to Democrats under Johnson.

“If these actions by the leader of our conference continue, then we are not a Republican Party—we are a uniparty that is hellbent on remaining on the path of self-inflicted destruction,” she wrote, according to a copy of the memo obtained by The New York Times. “I will neither support nor take part in any of that, and neither will the people we represent.”

Last month, Greene filed a motion to vacate Johnson after he worked with Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to pass a $1.2 trillion omnibus bill, putting a cap on a half-year ordeal to accomplish one of the legislature’s primary annual responsibilities: funding the government. The relatively big accomplishment is clearly still top of mind for Greene.

“Fully funding abortion, the trans agenda, the climate agenda, foreign wars and Biden’s border crisis is not ‘ensuring liberty, opportunity and security for all Americans,’” Greene wrote on Tuesday.

While the budget did set aside funds for climate change initiatives and U.S. border security, Greene seems to have forgetten that federal funds cannot be used for abortions, except in the case of rape, incest, or a life-threatening medical emergency to the pregnant person. The bill also makes no mention of transgender people.

But those weren’t the only agenda items Greene took issue with. Also on the list of reasons for ousting Johnson: failing to defund special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution against Donald Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and for making promises on Ukraine aid, which Johnson has pledged over the past several weeks to push through.

“Mike Johnson is publicly saying funding Ukraine is now his top priority when less than seven months ago he was against it,” Greene continued. “The American people disagree—they believe our border is the only border worth fighting a war over, and I agree with them.”

Other conservatives, meanwhile, aren’t so sure that Greene’s rampage signifies the end for Johnson—including House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner, who told CNN on Sunday that he doesn’t believe Johnson is at “any risk” of getting the boot.

Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has invested nearly $1.2 billion since it was formed in 2021. Nearly all of that money has come from foreign sources, raising major ethical red flags.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, 99 percent of Affinity’s investor funds have come from foreign sources, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Affinity, which is worth $3 billion, has received investments from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as corporate moguls like Terry Gou, who founded electronics giant Foxconn.

These are all countries that Kushner worked with when his father-in-law, Donald Trump, was in the White House. Kushner served as Trump’s main envoy to the Middle East and was a key figure in brokering the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the UAE, and Israel and Bahrain.

Kushner’s fund has invested in an Israeli car-leasing and financing company, an online real estate site based in Dubai, and an Abu Dhabi–supported fast food company that operates more than 1,000 restaurants in Brazil, the Times reported.

Kushner announced two of his biggest deals yet last month: a $500 million hotel and condominium complex in Serbia and two luxury developments in Albania. Neither of these deals could have happened without Kushner’s time working in the Trump administration, where he met the president of Serbia and the prime minister of Albania, who were directly involved in each respective deal.

During Trump’s presidential term, Kushner likely made hundreds of millions of dollars. Those earnings also were controversial, particularly due to his business deals with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar while meeting with them in his White House capacity.

Although Kushner specialized in the Middle East during Trump’s stint at the White House, he has come under fire for his stance on Palestine. Since Israel’s war in Gaza broke out, the Abraham Accords have been criticized for ignoring Palestinians.

Recently, Kushner told a Harvard University audience that he thought Gaza’s beach coastline was “very valuable,” essentially advocating for Israel ethnic cleansing the land to develop it. If he continues in this vein, he might have to deal with more direct protests, like the ones that crashed his awards ceremony at an Anti-Defamation League event last month.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. still can’t make up his mind about the January 6 rioters.

On Monday, Kennedy appeared to backtrack on a correction his campaign issued just last week. Appearing on NewsNation, the 70-year-old claimed that his campaign had made “a couple of mistakes” in issuing the revised statement.

“I think it was a protest that turned into a riot,” Kennedy told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo. “I think there were people who wanted insurrection and—but I don’t know what your definition of an insurrection is. If your definition is armed men who are intending to take over the United States government, it wasn’t that.

“I think that there were people who were there who wanted to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another. I would say it was a very traumatic day in our nation’s history and people committed criminal acts. Those people deserve to be in jail,” he continued.

Last week, Kennedy’s campaign released a fundraising email that described January 6 rioters as “activists.” The campaign apologized for the error the following day but doubled down on the idea that the event didn’t amount to a “true insurrection” since the rioters didn’t wield weapons.

No matter which definition you accept, Kennedy’s defense of the rioters—who chanted “Kill them all” while hunting down former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—is inaccurate, even from a cursory review of footage from the day. The rioters who ransacked their way through the halls of Congress did indeed wield weapons, including baseball bats, hockey sticks, fence rebar, flagpoles, pepper spray, and bear spray, U.S. Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gonell told CNN in 2021.

The rioters also attacked Capitol Police officers with firearms, knives, stolen police shields, stun guns, fire extinguishers, and even hand-to-hand combat, which sent more than a dozen officers to the hospital.

But Kennedy’s verbal appeal to the mob isn’t the only way he’s thrown his support behind them. The independent political candidate has also suggested that the legal prosecution of the people who ransacked Congress was tantamount to “harsh treatment,” which he would be willing to investigate by way of special counsel if elected president.

Ted Cruz’s podcast may be crossing some major lines.

The Campaign Legal Center, or CLC, a nonprofit organization, filed a complaint against the Texas senator on Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission. The watchdog group argues that the Verdict With Ted Cruz podcast can’t send its profits to a super PAC that supports Cruz’s campaign.

Cruz’s podcast, produced with iHeartMedia, generates hundreds of thousands of dollars, and may be a lucrative loophole in campaign finance law since he’s making the money himself. But, as The Daily Beast found, it raises a number of legal and ethical issues.

For one, campaign finance records show that at least seven lobbyists registered to represent iHeartMedia’s interests have donated tens of thousands of dollars to Cruz’s campaign since the podcast launched in 2022, The Daily Beast reports. Cruz and iHeartMedia claim that he doesn’t get paid for the podcast, volunteering his time instead, so the money is reported as “digital revenue” from ads on the podcast.

The CLC also filed a complaint over the podcast in 2022, claiming that Cruz accepting podcast production services from iHeartMedia violated a federal law that bars senators from receiving gifts from registered lobbyists. But Cruz has escaped any legal action or penalties since then.

Campaign finance law prohibits coordination between candidates—who are limited by how much money they can raise—and super PACs, which don’t have any limits on how much they can raise and spend from individuals and corporations. A candidate can’t raise any corporate money, let alone hundreds of thousands of dollars of it, to go into a super PAC.

And there’s no secret why Cruz is looking for every dollar he can get: He has a tough competitor for his Senate seat in Colin Allred, a Democratic representative and former NFL player and civil rights lawyer. After Allred won the Democratic Senate primary, Cruz was spooked so much that he begged for campaign donations in a Fox News interview.

Cruz already had a reputation for challenging campaign finance law, even without his ethically questionable podcast. It looks like he’ll keep trying to raise money however he can, and worry about the ethics later.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s latest potential book deal about the impeachment effort into President Joe Biden might actually put him in the crosshairs of an ethics investigation.

In a letter sent Tuesday to the Office of Congressional Ethics, the watchdog group Congressional Integrity Project requested a probe into Comer’s deal, citing House Rule 25 as the basis for their request. The group noted that “members may not ‘receive copyright royalties under a contract … unless that contract is first approved by the Standards Committee.’”

“As Representative Comer continues to hold hearings and attempts to build the case to impeach President Biden, the American people deserve to know the extent to which he is benefiting financially. It is clear already that he has a political motive to impeach the President and it should be revealed if he has a financial motive as well,” the letter stated.

Comer has already admitted that the impeachment was a dud. Last month, the Oversight chair confessed that criminal referrals were the most accountability that his meritless, wayward impeachment probe was going to achieve. That is, of course, a far cry from the investigation’s original goal, which was to remove Biden from office.

But the floundering impeachment effort—which was predominantly founded on a web of lies reportedly manufactured by top Russian intelligence officials—won’t rain on Comer’s parade. Instead, the Kentucky Republican appears to be attempting to turn the saga into a book deal. Last month, a placeholder image appeared on HarperCollins’s website featuring a book by Comer titled All the President’s Money, with an expected publication date of September 10. Comer has since disavowed the posting but didn’t reject that a deal is on the table.

“The link was put up in error by Harper Collins,” Comer spokesman Austin Hacker told Axios. “It was not authorized by Congressman Comer and he immediately requested it be taken down.”

“Although he has been in discussions with Harper Collins about a potential book, he has not entered into a publishing agreement with any publisher including Harper Collins,” Hacker added.

But the Congressional Integrity Project isn’t convinced that it’s a clean deal.

“From the beginning, this impeachment investigation was nothing but a political stunt and a desperate call for attention from James Comer—and this potential book deal further proves it,”  said the organization’s executive director, Kyle Herrig, in a statement.

“Comer and his fellow MAGA House Republicans have spent the last 15 months investigating the President and have not discovered a single shred of evidence of wrongdoing. The American people deserve to know where Comer’s true priorities lie—with doing Donald Trump’s bidding and making a quick buck with a book or with the important issues like health care and the cost of living that are affecting Americans across the country.”

If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, will he leave office gracefully at the end of his second term? Fox News host Jesse Watters seems to think so, despite Trump’s track record.

“Everybody knows Trump’s going to leave office just like he did the last time,” Watters said on the network Monday night, comparing the attitudes of Democrats who worry about Trump’s autocratic tendencies to people who get scared about the sun disappearing permanently after an eclipse.

Does Watters remember what happened after the 2020 election? If Trump will leave office “just like he did the last time,” does that mean he’ll refuse to concede his time is up, threaten violence, and then foment an insurrection? Does Watters realize that from now on, transitions of power in the United States carry a fear of violence, something that was once unthinkable?

And that’s not even getting into the election denialism that has now become pervasive in the Republican Party, which began with the “Stop the Steal” movement. All of this has led to the very credible fear of bad things happening after the election this November and in future years, no matter how the results go.

We got a hint of what would happen in 2020 when, in 2016, Trump said he would accept the election results “if I win.” And now, Watters and the rest of Fox News are trying to have the public forget about who Trump is and how he handles elections, perhaps because they plan to help him as November draws closer. And of course, if reality clashes with Watters and Fox News, they will blame the left, just like last time.

Ken Buck took a red pen to a flattering characterization of his former colleague Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, refusing to yield that the Georgia Republican was anything but a headache in Congress.

In an interview Monday night on CNN’s OutFront, the former Colorado representative strongly disagreed with a warm review of Greene by ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who likened the MAGA lawmaker to a policy hawk.

“Well, I think Kevin is much more experienced talking to Marjorie about policy than I do, first of all,” Buck told host Erin Burnett.

“Secondly, my experience with Marjorie is, people have talked to her about not filing articles of impeachment on President Biden before he was sworn into office, on not filing articles of impeachment that were groundless made on other individuals in the Biden administration,” he continued. “And she was never moved by that. She was always focused on her social media account.”

But, from where Buck stands, Greene doesn’t just suffer from a distracting social media addiction—she’s also blindly following the will of the Kremlin.

“Moscow Marjorie is focused now on this Ukraine issue and getting her talking points from the Kremlin and making sure that she is popular and she is getting a lot of coverage,” he said, echoing two other Republican lawmakers who have warned that many in the GOP are pushing Russian propaganda.

Buck left his post in the House last month amid another bout of seemingly endless Republican-fueled chaos, torching the lower chamber as “dysfunctional” and one of the worst legislative bodies in the “nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress.”

“Instead of having decorum, instead of operating in a professional manner, this place has just devolved into this bickering and nonsense and not really doing the job for the American people,” Buck said shortly after handing in his less-than-two-weeks notice to House leadership.

Meanwhile, Greene has filed a motion to vacate House Speaker Mike Johnson after he worked with Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to pass a $1.2 trillion omnibus bill, finalizing one of the legislature’s primary responsibilities: funding the government.

With all the recent departures, House Republicans need almost complete unity to pass legislation on their policy agenda. At the moment, the caucus can spare just one seat on any vote—one of the slimmest majorities in U.S. history.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is warning that Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 33,000 people, could legally be considered a genocide.

Warren made the comments during an event last week at a Boston-area mosque. Video of her speech began circulating on social media on Monday. The death toll in Gaza, which includes at least 13,000 children, is considered a low estimate due to the difficulty in counting the dead.

“If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so,” Warren said, speaking at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, Massachusetts. She was responding to an audience question about the International Court of Justice ruling that it was “plausible” Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza.

Warren noted that, for her, “it is far more important to say what Israel is doing is wrong. And it is wrong.”

“It is wrong to starve children within a civilian population in order to try to bend to your will. It is wrong to drop 2,000-pound bombs, in densely populated civilian areas,” she said.

Warren faced criticism for her stance on the war when she backed Israel after Hamas’s October 7 attacks. As Israel’s war ramped up, along with international criticism of its actions, protesters have shown up outside of Warren’s offices, as well as her home. One Palestinian American even confronted Warren at a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November. Warren also voted to send more military aid to Israel in February, part of a bill that defunded the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

Warren’s new stance is the latest example of Democrats criticizing Israel’s actions. On March 22, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez warned that the United States was complicit in the humanitarian crisis in the territory, and on March 15, Senator Chuck Schumer gave a speech criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct in Gaza.

Warren was also among eight Democratic senators who called on President Joe Biden in an open letter in March to suspend military aid to Israel while it blocked U.S. humanitarian aid to Gaza.

More recently, the White House had to cancel its annual iftar banquet with American Muslim leaders last week after invitations were rejected in protest of America’s Israel military campaign. On Monday, the Foreign Press Association issued a statement urging international journalists to be allowed unfettered access into Gaza, which Israel’s government continues to block.

Former associates of Donald Trump, look out—the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is lining up witnesses as his hush-money trial is set to begin.

Rhona Graff, Trump’s former assistant, and Madeleine Westerhout, his former director of Oval Office operations, are expected to testify in the trial, ABC News reported Monday, citing anonymous sources. They will join Hope Hicks, the former White House communications director and onetime aide to Trump, who has already testified before a grand jury investigating Trump’s interference in the 2020 election.

In addition, Deborah Tarasoff, a former employee in the Trump Organization’s accounting department, as well Jeffrey McConney, the organization’s onetime controller, will likely be called to testify. They all join the most well-known name on this list: Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal attorney.

The list extends beyond Trump’s ex-employees. David Pecker, a former executive with American Media Inc., will likely testify, as well as National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard. American Media Inc. used to own the tabloid newspaper, and prosecutors say both Howard and Pecker were involved in “catch and kill” methods to keep negative stories about Trump from spreading during his 2016 presidential campaign.

The trial has already gotten off to a rough start from Trump’s perspective. He’s facing an expanded gag order after he repeatedly attacked the daughter of presiding Judge Juan Merchan on Truth Social. Trump has tried to delay the trial numerous times, including by making the claim that there’s too much “pretrial publicity” and by suing Merchan.

The former president faces 34 felony charges for falsifying business records regarding a payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election to hide a 2006 affair they had. It’s his first criminal trial, and jury selection is set to begin on April 15.